Accurate and precise liquid movement or transport of dispensing across the macro, micro and nano worlds to a destination is of interest in countless areas including: drug and liquid product manufacturing; proteomics; genomics; bio and other agent detection; forensics; home and other health care; environmental and other areas and manufacturing of all types. The ability to accurately and precisely transport liquids can be employed to manufacture drugs or prescriptions; prepare samples for chemical analysis or for medical diagnostics, bioagent detection or handling or for forensics testing; to place chemicals, drugs or samples onto food, plants, animals humans or other objects or into scientific or other instruments or to perform isolation and purification functions; such as, filtration; solid phase extraction and liquid chromatography. The ability to manipulate small and large quantities of liquids using electric fields has other lesser known potential including: manufacturing new entities such as electronic components; frozen charged functionalized chemical entities that we have called nanoliter-sicles, repairing crystalline optics for large lasers and increasing the dynamic range of solution transport to existing pumping systems of diverse types. Devices that transport low quantities of liquids for such purposes have historically been largely mechanical in nature and they include: microliter syringes of all types; capillaries with attached bulbs; multi-channel pipettes and many different types of common pumps. More recently other devices have been applied to transport small quantities of liquids for various purposes including: piezoelectric devices; ink jets and other electromechnical devices. Such devices are not capable of dispensing liquids and performing useful functions across the macro, micro and the nano regimes (i.e., from mLs, to uLs to nLs to pLs to fLs) singly or in parallel with one source of energy. Either they cannot accurately transport the liquids across such a dynamic range or they have adverse properties including: inability to overcome adhesion and/or cohesion of small volume of liquids or liquid drops adhering to surfaces and as such they must touch off the liquid possibly contaminating the liquid or target, the device or both. Alternatively, even when for example low volumes of liquids are produced (but not higher volumes) they are not directed by the drop producing process and they can take trajectories that are not directed to locales causing errant location dispensing. Also, all low volume dispensing systems have large dead volumes, are complicated, and expensive in design and requiring at least one energy source per channel. Also they can exhibit have adverse electrochemistry; produce joule heating; or combinations thereof; that impact reliability and cost. Also, such devices again, cannot create and energize liquids, creating either drops or sprays, launch (i.e., push or pull) such drops or sprays to targets through the air as it actively directs the liquids trajectories to locales or targets that can be non-conducting or conducting without touching the target as it provides the energy to overcome the adhesion and cohesion of a liquid or liquids in drop, spray or hybrid form on the nested gaussian surface, N channels at a time with a minimum of one source of energy.
Technology that we have called induction based fluidics can make a simple capillaries of channels dispense liquids over more than nine order of magnitude and it has massive application space in matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectroscopy in cancer diagnostics, polymer characterizations, and many other areas of health care and basic research and in manufacturing of drugs and special entities and elsewhere.
We have patented (U.S. Pat. No. 6,149,815) technology that can dispense liquids as it also performs functions across a massive dynamic range of literally in certain configurations and energy from mLs to fLs that has no moving parts, no or little joule heating, no adverse electrochemistry (i.e., faradaic processes) and that can perform parallel dispensing, parallel solid phase extraction, parallel filtration, parallel LC and parallel instrument introduction and more using as few as one source of energy where for N channels where N can literally be a very large number, as it directs the liquid to targets. In more recent work, we have taken this patented tool set that we call induction based fluidics and we have expanded the capabilities to small, less complicated even handheld devices that can dispense, literally fly liquids, as it directs liquids in the uL, nL and pL volume range using off-the-shelf devices like microliter syringes, or modified pipette tips to developing totally new technology that can place nanoliters onto humans or make MALDI spot plates in parallel or manufacture charged frozen nanoliter spheres that we have called nanoliter-sicles that can be aspirated by charged on non-charged rods, and as we have merged this IBF technology into more traditional older pumps; so that, IBF can be applied in tandem to other pump technology gaining the benefit or IBF including a wide dynamic range, highly parallel dispensing and other sample treatment options, excellent volumetric and spatial accuracy and precision plus unique capabilities and significant advances to larger fields of application.
In summary, this application extends IBF where this liquid transport technology that can employ as little as one source of electrical energy alone or use multiple sources of energy in tandem to transport, launch or fly, move or dispense one or more liquids as a flow, drop or spray to non-conducting or conducting targets one at a time or in a highly parallel manner across the mL, uL, nL, p L and fL dynamic volume range as it directs or attracts the liquid actively or passively to precise locations on inanimate or animate targets whether they are conductors or nonconductors. When the nested, gaussian surfaces contain filters or frits, SPE media, chromatographic phases, or other functionalized media the device can perform functions on the liquids; such as, filter, extract, chromatograph, purify and place or otherwise transform the liquid or its contents as they serially perform the transport function in a parallel mode optionally placing the liquid onto a target or targets be they surfaces, containers, scientific instruments, chemicals, drugs, food products, plant, animal or human subjects or other targets as it provides one or more ways to quantify the volume, and locations of the liquid/s providing other ways to facilitate operation.
Because the physical movement of fluids is so elementary to so many processes in biotechnology, health care, manufacturing, daily life and other areas it is impossible to adequately address all applications of this matter transport technology.